If you're thinking about buying in Litchfield County, you keep hearing the same three names: Litchfield, Washington, Kent.

There are five towns in this county that almost nobody talks about — and one of them has the lowest median home price in the entire county.

I'm Dave Jones with Dave Jones Realty. Let's count them down.

#5 — Barkhamsted: $465,000 median, 23.94 mill rate

The quietest town on this list and probably the one you've heard least about. (Shout out to my Aunt Sue and Uncle Tommy, who live up here.)

The median is $465,000 and it's held essentially flat over the past year — which in the market we're actually in is interesting. It means this town hasn't caught fire the way some of its neighbors have. And the mill rate of 23.94 is very low for this part of the state.

Why nobody's talking about it is simple: there's no big commercial center to drive through, no classic town green to photograph. It doesn't announce itself the way Litchfield does. (Though the historic village of Riverton in the north end of town is a genuinely charming little center — Hitchcock Chair country — and worth the drive on its own.)

What Barkhamsted has instead is space. The Barkhamsted Reservoir and Saville Dam show up in more wedding and engagement photos than almost anywhere in Connecticut. People's State Forest covers roughly 3,000 acres right here. And the West Branch of the Farmington River — a federally designated Wild and Scenic river — runs right along the town's edge.

Barkhamsted gives you more land for your dollar than almost anywhere else on this list. The buyers who end up here are usually the ones who already tried the better-known towns first.

I had a client last year who kept telling me she wanted more space, but every town I showed her felt too tight. When we finally walked the lot lines out in Barkhamsted, it was the first place she stood in the driveway and stopped talking for a minute. For her, that was basically a yes.

This is not a town for someone who needs a coffee shop within walking distance. It's a town for someone who wants to open their back door and not see a neighbor's siding. You will probably also see a bear. If fishing, hiking, and cross-country skiing once the snow hits sound like your version of a good weekend, Barkhamsted stops looking like an afterthought pretty fast.

#4 — Watertown: $365,000 median, up 7.4%, 30.04 mill rate

Another one close to my heart — and home to one of our offices, right on Main Street by the green. Stop in.

Let me be straight up front: 30.04 is the highest mill rate of the five towns on this list. You do pay a bit more on the tax side here. Here's what you get for it.

Watertown sits close enough to Waterbury that real shopping and real services are minutes away, while keeping a completely separate identity and its own town center on the green. I've shown Watertown to buyers who had already written off the whole area as "too close to Waterbury," and the reaction is almost always the same — they didn't realize you could get the convenience without actually being in the city.

The housing stock is genuinely mixed: older homes near the green, newer construction on the outskirts, and a good supply of condos. You're not boxed into one price point here.

Watertown is also home to Taft, a well-known prep school that brings activity and civic pride to the town center in a way you don't usually find in a town this size. And the roads connecting out toward Woodbury and Thomaston mean you're never locked into one direction.

For outdoor time, the Steele Brook Greenway and Crestbrook Park are right in town — no separate drive required. And you can be up in Litchfield or over at Bantam Lake in Morris in about twenty minutes.

The buyers I bring here are usually people who grew up near a small city somewhere and want that same rhythm without the price tag.

#3 — Harwinton: $439,000 median, 23.00 mill rate

Harwinton's median is almost identical to last year, which tells you the town hasn't been discovered yet. Prices are flat, which means buyers haven't started competing hard for the inventory.

The mill rate is 23.00 — the lowest of any town on this list, and that matters more than people realize once you start running actual monthly numbers.

Harwinton doesn't have a commercial strip to speak of. You're not walking to anything. It's mostly farmland, stone walls, and winding roads, wedged between Litchfield and Torrington, with Burlington close by — which means you're never more than about fifteen minutes from a real downtown even though your own town feels like the middle of nowhere.

Low taxes, real privacy, short drive to everything. That combination is exactly why I think this town is due for a jump — and towns like this tend to get discovered all at once rather than gradually, because there's nothing gradual about word getting around a small town.

There are working farms here that have been in the same family for generations, a handful of small country stores instead of strip malls, and the Harwinton Fair every fall — one of the oldest agricultural fairs in Connecticut.

This isn't a town you pass through on the way somewhere else. You have to actually mean to go there. No highway cuts through pulling attention toward the next exit. There's a volunteer fire department, a small library that still feels like the center of things, and enough open land that new construction here means real acreage instead of quarter-acre lots.

Buyers who want the Litchfield rural feel without the Litchfield price tag often end up here — once somebody points them in the direction.

Notice the pattern yet?

Every town so far has a mill rate under 31. Every single one. That's not an accident.

These are towns that got skipped while everybody chased the name-brand towns in this county. The skipped-over towns with the low mill rates are exactly where I tell buyers to start looking first — before they even think about the towns everyone else is bidding on.

I've been doing this twenty years and I see it over and over: the towns with the most name recognition usually have the highest mill rates, because a town doesn't need to compete on taxes when buyers are already lining up for the name alone. The towns that do have to compete are the ones handing you a better deal, if you're willing to look.

And I'm not going to tell you these towns are perfect

Because they're not, and that's not how I do business.

  • No hospitals inside any of these town limits. You're driving to Torrington, New Milford, or Waterbury. That's true of most of this county.
  • Internet and cell coverage can be genuinely spotty once you're outside the town center — especially in Barkhamsted and Harwinton. If you work fully remote, check the specific street before you write an offer.
  • You're going to drive more. That's the trade for the low mill rate and the extra land.

I'd rather tell you all of this before you fall in love with a house and then wonder where the closest grocery store is. Buyers who know what they're signing up for stay happy long after closing.

#2 — New Hartford: $388,250 median, up 5%, 26.87 mill rate

This is the town on the list with the most actual village character. There's a real center — restaurants that have been there for years — and it sits right on the Farmington River, which means kayaking, tubing, and fishing practically in your backyard depending on where you land.

The tubing run through Satan's Kingdom in New Hartford is one of the best-known stretches of river in the state. People drive from all over Connecticut for it every summer, and it's right here.

I've had out-of-state buyers ask me about river access before they asked about anything else, and New Hartford comes up in that conversation more than any other town in the county — yet it almost never appears in anybody's "best of Litchfield County" list.

The village center has a real coffee shop, a market, and a couple of restaurants that fill up on weekends. None of it feels manufactured for tourists the way some river towns do. It grew that way naturally, over decades, because people who move here tend to stay.

That stability shows up in how the town feels when you're standing in it. There's genuine civic pride — the annual downtown events pull crowds from twenty minutes away, and the town green still functions the way a town green is supposed to, as an actual gathering point instead of a patch of grass with a memorial on it.

It's the kind of downtown that makes you understand why people grow up here and rarely leave, even when they could easily afford to.

Here's what ties these four together. None has a flashy reputation. None shows up in the same sentence as Litchfield, Washington, or Kent. But every one has a lower mill rate, a lower median price, and in most cases more land for the money than the towns everybody's already talking about.

That's not a coincidence. That's what happens when a town doesn't have a marketing department behind it.

#1 — Winsted (Town of Winchester): $280,000 median, 29.17 mill rate

Before I say it, guess. It's not the one with the lowest mill rate — that's Harwinton. Not the one with the river — that's New Hartford. Not the one with the most land — that's Barkhamsted. Not the one closest to city conveniences — that's Watertown.

This is the town with the single lowest median home price in all of Litchfield County.

Winsted — which is technically a borough within the Town of Winchester. You'll see Winchester on your tax bill, but everybody local says Winsted. That alone trips up out-of-state buyers searching online for a town they can't seem to find.

Median price: $280,000. Let that sit, because that's genuinely rare in Connecticut right now. Pair it with a 29.17 mill rate and Winsted has something the other four towns on this list don't: an actual downtown. Real architecture, brick storefronts, a working main street grid, and a movie theater — the Gilson, which is one of the first places I ever took my wife, twenty-six years ago. Look it up.

Highland Lake sits right on the edge of town for anyone who wants water access without paying shoreline prices. Swimming, boating, a real beach — practically within walking distance of homes priced lower than almost anywhere else in the county.

This was a thriving mill town, and it's still working on its comeback. Which means buyers getting in now are getting in before the comeback finishes. I've watched this movie before — it gives me a lot of the same feeling Naugatuck did a few years ago. The comeback always finishes eventually. The only question is whether you own something here before or after.

Downtown Winsted has more surviving early-1900s architecture than almost any town its size, and it's slowly filling back in with small businesses the way these towns do once people start paying attention. There's a genuine sense that this place is on its way somewhere.

I'd rather buy into a town on its way up than a town that's already arrived.

All five, side by side

# Town Median Price Mill Rate Est. Annual Tax at Median
1 Winsted (Winchester) $280,000 29.17 ~$5,717
2 New Hartford $388,250 26.87 ~$7,303
3 Harwinton $439,000 23.00 ~$7,068
4 Watertown $365,000 30.04 ~$7,675
5 Barkhamsted $465,000 23.94 ~$7,793

Based on Connecticut's 70% assessment ratio. Estimates only — actual bills depend on the town's assessed value for the specific property, and mill rates are set annually.

Look at that right-hand column. Four of these five towns land within about $700 a year of each other on taxes despite median prices spanning nearly $100,000 — and Winsted comes in roughly $2,000 a year below all of them.

Every one of these towns is also within a reasonable drive of a hospital, a grocery store, and a full school system, which is what people worry about most when I bring up a town they've never heard of. Quiet doesn't mean cut off.

What to actually do with this

Don't default to the name-brand towns you keep hearing about. The algorithm shows you what gets clicked, not what fits your budget and your life.

Check the mill rate before you fall in love with the price. A lower sales price in a high-mill-rate town can cost you more month after month than a slightly higher price in a town like Harwinton or New Hartford.

And if a town feels quiet when you drive through, don't assume there's nothing there. Sometimes quiet just means nobody's told everybody else yet.

Here's my actual homework for you: take a Saturday and drive all five back to back. Start in Barkhamsted, end in Winsted. You'll come away with a completely different picture of this county.

None of these towns are secrets because they're bad towns. They're secrets because they don't have the name recognition Litchfield built over decades — and buyers default to names they already know instead of looking past them.

Call or text: 203-910-2638 Email: Dave@davejonesrealty.com Search every home in Connecticut: www.searchallcthomes.com

Let's figure out which of these fits — or whether a town nobody's mentioned yet fits you better.

Market data reflects the most recent reporting period available at the time of writing and changes continuously; mill rates are set annually. Contact Dave Jones Realty for current figures on any specific town. For school information, we recommend GreatSchools.org and visiting districts directly. Buyers researching any Connecticut community should conduct their own independent due diligence on all factors relevant to their decision.

 

Dave Jones Realty LLC | Serving New Haven, Hartford, and Litchfield Counties